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| 2010-03-16 17:34 |
| Thank Q-105 |
| Public |
| Stevie Wonder -- I Wish |
| age, childhood, disco, florida, music, nostalgia, r&b, radio, rock, the 1970s, video, youtube |
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( Heard this early in our maraud today. )
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| 2010-02-20 21:12 |
| The Dork Who Fell To Earth |
| Public |
| cd, childhood, culture, david bowie, disney, dork tower, fandom, fantasy, fate, flight, flight simulator, friends, full frontal nerdity, history, life on mars, music, nasa, science, science-fiction, space program, space tourism, space travel, the 1970s, the future, time, time machines, who am i |
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(I think ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) theidolhands might want to hear about this little "space oddity".)
Today, my buddy Paul gave me an audio CD copy of content he acquired though his Disney contacts...
...Soundtracks from the Moonliner and Mission To Mars attractions at the Disney theme parks.
Listening to them threw me back thirty-one years to the first time I visited Florida and Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was my favorite of the attractions then. The concept was a flight-simulation theater that took the crowd on a semi-realistic journey to the Red Planet, with rudimentary motion seating and panoramic projection screens of the spacecraft's external views. Before entering the theater itself, the crowd would go through a "Mission Control Brief" led by an audio-anamatronic character, who stood in front of banks of NASA-variety high-tech consoles "manned" by other robotic mannekins. The far wall of the room had large screen video and movie projectors. Going through that was, to a twelve-year-old kid, like living the future.
This disk had all fifteen minutes of audio from that attraction, and now my imagination can flit back there and remember it all. Three other tracks were from the earlier Moonliner incarnation of the ride, with public address chatter of a ("transistor-punk"?) aerospace passenger terminal, engine noise from a George Pal-era spaceship, and overture music from when it was 100% acoustic orchestral hardware. No better evidence of how much the world has changed...and also, how much the world's future avoided what we thought we wanted, back in those decades after WW2.
I'll go back to Florida, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was replaced before I finished my flight training around 1990, and space tourism is either alive and well, or about to be swept aside by history, depending on who you ask. In the meantime, I'm the Dork Who Fell To Earth, looking for the next hyperspace portal and saving up for a ticket to Anthea. Hope you'll be on the flight with me. I could always use a travelling companion.
PS: Thanks to www.lunar.org...some visuals of what space tourism looked like to Disney from the outside: ( Read more... )
And from www.davelandweb.com...Mission Control: ( Read more... )
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| 2010-02-09 12:40 |
| Writer's Block: Wake up and smell the coffee |
| Public |
| bread, breakfast, childhood, coffee, food, history, sleep, time, travel, vacation, writer's block |
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Sleep, sleep, sleep! Granted, the best breakfast I've had in recent times (relatively speaking) was one I ate at a hotel I worked at after a night shift. Before that, it was at a hotel restaurant during a vacation taken back when Ford or Carter was President. (I got the splurge deal. I could handle it back then; I was a growing boy.) Simple matter: food is a chore; sleep isn't.
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Kindergarten, 2/3rds of First Grade: Chilicothe, OH. Last 3rd of First Grade, Second Grade, Third Grade: Waterford, PA. Fourth, Fifth, Sixth Grade: Bairdford, PA. Seventh Grade on: The chaos that was Hernando County, FL--where we attended schools that were still being built around us and everybody came from somewhere else. How it is...having to give up good friendships and start everything social all over again...never being "one of the boys" and being excluded from things because of that...being seen more as an enemy than a possible friend...culture shocks. There is a part of me that can blame my failure on the fact that I could never fit in with my scholastic peers. But I made a lot of bad choices too. I can't blame those on where I was and who was around me.
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...And the concept that a popular prime-time TV show that had run its course, or a pop band that had likewise gotten to a certain state of reknown, could have a new lease on life as the basis for an animated version for kids. It's been a very long time since this was common. Home Improvement and The Nanny did animated special episodes during their runs, but there hasn't been any cartoon spin-offs as such. The last pop star cartoon I remember was Hammerman; yes, I know about Gorillaz but I'm not sure they were intended for the Saturday Morning audience.
I'm not sure I'm so much nostalgic about the idea, but it's weird that there is so little in current mainstream pop culture that we can feel comfortable in sharing with the younger set. What does that say about our culture and our mass media's tastemakers?
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| 2010-01-06 16:31 |
| When I Was Supposed To Be Served |
| Public |
| anime, childhood, creative muse, culture, fandom, mass media, nostalgia, pop culture, superheroes, the 1970s, transformers, tv, webcomics, who am i |
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The current storyline on the webcomic Shortpacked! is about the "remastering" that ABC did to the first season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers...the exact way done to the first season of Transformers to make "Generation 2" years ago.
Well, the subject creeped to "what fandom defined your childhood?", a question I tried to answer by looking at a Wikipedia Saturday Morning TV schedule from the year before I entered Kindergarten. To my dismay, very very little that year was "new". In fact, the "new" was really the same-old-same-old. Hanna-Barbera and Filmation and Sid & Marty Krofft doing whatever they wanted. Reruns of MGM/WB/Universal short cartoons from the preceding four decades. Animated retreads of past primetime hits/pop culture. Everything I was supposed to be "into" had already been around from before I was born.
No wonder I felt like I wanted something that was my own.
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Back when I was a kid I considered it. The near-future scared me and the far-future looked promising so I wondered whether it would be a good idea. In retrospect, it was better to watch the future come than to sleep through it.
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Don't have a kid. I come from the mimeograph and filmstrip era of education. Sure, in high school we had the first mass-produced PCs and video equipment to play around with, but beyond that we were still in the old school of old school.
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| 2009-11-25 16:24 |
| Tough Times For The Anime Industry: Via Wall Street Journal |
| Public |
| anime, business, childhood, dysfunction, fandom, japan, links, news, nostalgia, otaku, pop culture, tv |
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Foreign competition, outsourcing, low morale...is this the end of an era?
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A few months ago, somebody on USENET (which I still read and will until my ISP pulls the plug) asked about a series of action figures that were around about ten years ago and haven't been seen since. Well, from his description I felt that I had seen them as well, but couldn't remember what they were or who made them.
Got the answer today. They were "Unifighters" from Galoob. They were G. I. Joe (of that era, mind you)-sized and had backpacks that could mate with one another to make vehicles. The Air Force set made a fighter plane, the Marines set made a helicopter, the Army set made a tank and the Navy set made a hoverboat. They were pegwarmers at Kay-Bee (they were only available as the set, not as individual blister cards, so it was on the expensive side) for about a year when I was in college. Galoob was eventually taken over by Hasbro, so in theory Hasbro could re-issue these Joe knockoffs as Joe merchandise, if they still have the molds.
FP
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| 2009-11-03 00:35 |
| My Mom Will Love The Punchline Of This Comic Strip |
| Public |
| backward compatible, childhood, comics, e-books, full frontal nerdity, geoeconomics, history, money, nostalgia, virtual reality, webcomics |
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( Backward Compatible By Aaron Williams )
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| 2009-10-20 16:24 |
| Wednesday's On The Phone To Thursday-- |
| Public |
| beatles, childhood, culture, disco, education, friends, history, learning, music, nostalgia, pop charts, pop culture, radio, the 1970s, time, who am i |
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--Friday's on the phone to me!
My friend Paul gave me the MP3 files to the remastered Beatles catalog this week, all 16 albums and collections. So I've been playing some of the songs every so often and will probably do so all season till I get to all of them.
I suppose I have a rather skewed view of the band compared to most people. You see, I was a baby in their heyday (I was born around the time Revolver came out) but they had already broken up by the time I was allowed to listen to the radio in the early Seventies. So I knew all four of them as solo artists FIRST. It wasn't till much later in life that I got the message that these guys were THESE GUYS and so on.
The media establishment was so quick to move on that their songs as a group were largely out of circulation for some years. Besides, Paul kept on making hit records with Wings. There was no point to look back at that time...unless you were looking back to the Fifties in the wake of American Grafitti and Happy Days. It took the Disco backlash, Elvis' death, the Beatlemania Broadway show (anybody remember that?) and the Sgt. Pepper's movie/soundtrack to start a Beatles nostalgia trend in earnest.
Anyway, I come from a time warp with regards to that realm of pop culture. I'm like a baseball fan who has to remember that the Dodgers once played in Brooklyn, or a car nut who must be prompted that GM used to have a brand of cars called LaSalle. Well, I'm not THAT bad. After all, I can ask my brother (who played a role in his High School's Beatles-based revue).
FP
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I realize that I've been a lot poorer than even I feared. I had tech envy for my uncle's computer (even if it was running Vista), his high-speed internet, his satellite TV (and the fact that both his flat-screen sets were bigger than our old cathy tubes)--even his coffeemaker. But we got a lot of use from his GPS receiver, which guided us through what had once been familiar territory in Western Pennsylvania. Dad and I would never have found Robert and Grace's gravesite without the GPS, and it did an okay job getting us to Fawn Haven #3 and the house on Skyview Terrace.
But as for finding the school site, I did it completely by seat-of-pants, as the old site wouldn't have been in any GPS database that I knew. We left Gibsonia for Florida long before I learned to drive, but I rode the bus there from Fawn Haven over 500 times as a kid...
...And I amazed myself. I'd forgotten the street names, but still knew which directions to turn and everything.
Maybe I shouldn't have trained to be a Pilot at all. Maybe I should have been a Navigator from Day One.
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| 2009-09-17 23:24 |
| Thirty Years Ago, This Song Was New And On The Charts |
| Public |
| John Stewart -- Gold |
| childhood, dad, driving, errands, family, mom, music, nostalgia, pennsylvania, place, the 1970s, travel, video, youtube |
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( And I Had Left Pennsylvania For Florida )
...And word is I'll be accompanying my parents back to Pennsy starting Monday for a soujourn.
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| 2009-09-10 12:57 |
| Will ADHD Soon Be A Thing Of The Past? |
| Public |
| angst, caffeine, childhood, coffee, depression, drugs, marketing, medicine, mental health, news, philosophy, science |
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Scientists Announce A Breakthrough In The Search For The Cause Of Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder.
As somebody who was in this condition as a child, and is somewhat still afflicted now (as in, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to motivate myself) I find this development very interesting. Remember, my childhood predates Ritalin. For me, it was either coffee or amphetamines.
The only drawbacks I see are the same drawbacks I see with prescription drugs in general--the out-of-control marketing of drugs by the manufacturers (yes, those fine-print-laden and sappy TV ads on the network evening news and talk shows and soap operas) which then feeds a black market (q.v. e-mail spammers allegedly from Canada) which recreational drug users/abusers will exploit.
But a philosophy question: If a pill gives a kid a happy childhood, is it really a happy childhood?
FP
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Middle kid. Perpetually in the shadow of my extroverted and super-cool older sister, and always having to "behave" to be a positive influence on my younger brother.
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| 2009-08-09 12:47 |
| Writer's Block: Unlikely Benefactor |
| Public |
| age, books, charity, childhood, education, history, learning, money, museum, school, writer's block |
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$100,000 each for the following: 1) & 2) My alma mater colleges 3) The school I'm attending now 4) 5) 6) The school districts of my childhood years 7) 8) 9) The public libraries in the towns where I lived in those same years 10) The Smithsonian.
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